While completing our microplastics research project, Amanda and I had some crazy adventures. One cold rainy day, we decided that it would be a good day to collect samples of sand because we would likely be the only ones at the beaches we visit. We decided to collect one gallon plastic bags full of sand from different beaches around Martha's Vineyard. We made it to four beaches up-island. My job was to run down to the beach, collect gallon bags of sand (while getting hit by waves), take pictures, and mark the GPS location. It was pouring rain almost the entire time. It was raining so hard, that Amanda decided that she better “take notes” at two of the beaches, while I fetch the sand.
The first beach we stopped at was Moshup Beach, otherwise known as GayHead. As soon as I walked out of the car it started to POURING rain, but I got the job done.
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| Moshup Beach |
The next beach we visited was Lobsterville Public Beach. At Lobsterville, the sand was a orange color.
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| Lobsterville Public Beach |
We went to the next beach, Squibnocket. Squibnocket was really windy and stormy.
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| Squibnocket |
Then we went to the last beach, Lucy Vincent. We had to ask permission if we could go in for free, in the name of science.
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| Lucy Vincent |
When we sifted through our samples, we only found 3 plastics under 5 mm. We are wondering if you can find more plastics when it's low tide due to the tide receding and leaving a seaweed line where we have observed plastics mixed up with. If we had more time, we would go back to these beaches during low tide to see if our result changed.
Both Amanda and I had fun on our rainy day adventure. #science #nature #Martha'sVineyard
1 comment:
Grey - You're getting good at adding the little details that bring your reader into the scene you're describing - for me, it was the humor of Amanda "taking notes" while you ran around in the rain collecting samples. That would totally be my strategy too! Interesting results, and a good question re. the tide level affecting the collection. Scientists talk about experimental conditions, which are the conditions you are actually trying to vary to see how they affect results, and control conditions, which you try to keep the same as possible so they don't interfere with results. It would be a good mini-experiment to see if there is a variation in microplastic collection due to high or low tide. If you aren't able to do that, you would want to think about being consistent re. collecting at high or low tide and/or recording whether you collected at high or low tide.
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